​Happy Autumn everyone, although it is more like midsummer. Thank you to the intrepid WSZIO volunteers for another successful season!And now, back to a topic I have been writing about at least for the past 8 years, which is becoming more and more important, especially with the Mayoral election coming up; the homelessness crisis in New York City. Years ago, when I went on my "speaking tour" about the failing homeless housing policies of the Bloomberg administration to the local community groups it was clear that a humanitarian crisis was in the making. However, this was not immediately felt in our communities here and it may have seemed like an SEP (somebody else's problem). That has now changed, and people are asking why and how to deal with this.First, let me say if you are interested in learning more about this issue in depth, go to the Coalition for the Homeless website, and read their yearly "State of the Homeless" analysis available at: http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/state-of-the-homeless-2017/. They have been doing this for years, and come out with a new report every year. Below are some quotes from this year's report."At the beginning of 2017, 62,692 men, women, and children slept in NYC homeless shelters each night. This was down slightly from the all-time high of 62,840 in November 2016. The shelter census has increased 4 percent since the same time last year and 79 percent since the beginning of 2007. Fueling today’s record homelessness was the steep and sustained increase that took place between 2011 and 2014, as a result of the previous administration’s elimination of all housing assistance programs for homeless families.""There is no question that the City and State can implement solutions that work, but in order to match the unprecedented need, they must both accelerate and bring to scale their respective affordable and supportive housing production pipelines."We feel there are several simultaneous approaches to this problem on Federal, City and State levels:NYCHA: Include the homeless in NYCHA housing: "… including increasing stable housing placements in NYCHA and HPD to 5,500 per year for families"Subsidized housing: "5,000 rent subsidies and supported placements for single adults" Affordable housing: "…a new capital development program to finance construction of at least 10,000 units of affordable housing for homeless households over the next years."For years NYCHA has had vacant apartments because the homeless were excluded from public housing under the Bloomberg administration. Under de Blasio, that has changed, but not enough. It is also clear, and has been for some time, that the elimination of Federal (Section 8), State and City (The Advantage program) housing subsidy programs had helped create this monster over the past 10 years. Some of these subsidy programs have been reinstated, but right now may be too little too late. These subsidies must increase to keep people in their homes and out of homelessness and shelter.Affordable housing is key as well. In the past affordable housing was considered to be without profit, and the almost complete focus was on building luxury housing (creating a glut on the market with the curious result that the city is paying $4-8,000 of taxpayer's per month to these landlords to house homeless families, but more on this later). A mandated number of affordable units and tax incentives encourage affordable housing, but many more units must be built. And it must be monitored that the developers do not treat the affordable housing tenants in their buildings like second-class citizens and do not take the incentive money as a scam to lessen the cost of luxury development. Supportive housing also plays a big role, and helps many people with chronic physical or mental illness get back on their feet and allows them to eventually go out their own with a little help.A return to possible institutionalization: In the 1980's, to save money, the state released most of the mentally challenged individuals from their hospitals with a vague promise of "community based care" which never materialized even remotely to the extent it was needed. This has created a decades-long legacy of mentally ill people going without treatment and living by their wits on the streets. This is cruel in the extreme. Some people need help to survive. Some need treatment that they are either not getting, or getting sporadically at best. Others have such serious issues that they need safe, totally supervised care. Some of these people can be a danger to themselves or others and need to be taken off the streets and treated.Building more shelters is not a strategy. Building 90 shelters, or 100, or 150, or a million is not the answer, no matter where they are. When will it stop? This is a stop gap solution and only works on a purely reactive basis. In this regard, Mayor De Blasio is on the wrong track. Due to the catastrophic ideas of the past administration the homeless housing policy went off the rails, and we saw an unprecedented increase in homelessness. Subsidies were taken away leaving thousands of families to fall into homelessness. Developers had a field day building luxury towers and housing on every square inch of the city to the exclusion of everything else, often with huge tax breaks with no thought of who could afford to live in them. The middle class in Manhattan, and now in parts of Brooklyn, were, and still are being forced out because of this "luxury" market and huge rent increases; not everyone is a Wall Street hedge fund manager. Where do they go when they are displaced because of out of control rental costs? Unfortunately, shelters became a gold mine for developers, who would unload white elephant "luxury" housing on the city through middlemen and get huge above market rents as cluster site housing for the homeless, and in a cruel irony, the more homeless, the higher the profits (the Westchester Sq v DHS 2010 lawsuit was largely about this). Mayor DeBlasio recognized this problem when he took office, but has been ineffective in doing anything about it. We need real proactive solutions, and that's where the money and resources should go, not into landlord's pockets. Don't wait until you have broken it and then fix it; don't break it in the first place.And last, but not least, and this is a call for some enterprising lawyer or elected official to consider: go back to court and revisit the Callahan vs Carey consent decree of 1981, which states that the City and State of New York are obligated to provide emergency shelter for all individuals who are homeless by reason of poverty or due to mental, physical, or social dysfunction within 24 hours. New York is the only city in the United States to currently have this legal obligation to provide shelter for anyone, no matter where they are from, or risk legal consequences.I know rent subsidies ("Section 8"), affordable housing, and supportive housing are not popular with communities, and this is a hot-button issue. But, having grown up in poverty myself and lived in public housing in Brooklyn, I must state for the record that being poor is not a crime. Many people who work full time are below the poverty level (the working poor). Ask yourself if you could support a home and a family on the current minimum wage of $600 a week. People need help. Who knows, maybe you or a loved one will need help if you or they become homeless or fall behind on the rent. We must stop treating the poor and mentally challenged as de facto criminals, and give them the help they need.Happy Halloween!TTFN